[In the following excerpt, Groom tries to define forgery in light of the Rowley manuscript controversy that occurred after Chatterton's death; in his discussion, Groom focuses on the complex debate concerning the difference between history and fiction and the importance of authorial intention in deciding whether a document is indeed a forgery.]

At that point Don Giuseppe would explain to him at length how the work of the historian is all deception, all fraud; how there was more merit in inventing history than transcribing it from old maps and tablets and ancient tombs; how, therefore, in all honesty, their efforts deserved an immensely larger compensation than the work of a real historian, a historiographer who enjoyed the benefits of merit and status.

‘It's all fraud. History does not exist. Perhaps you think the generations of leaves that have dropped from that tree autumn after autumn still exist? The tree exists; its new leaves exist; but these leaves will also fall; in time, the tree itself will disappear—in smoke, in ashes. … What we are making, you and I, is a little fire, a little smoke with these limbs, in order to beguile people, whole nations—every living human being … History!’¹

(Leonardo Sciasca, The Council of Egypt).

Thomas Chatterton was a forger. What does this statement, this knowledge, mean? Chatterton forged literature: he forged language, he forged scholarly credentials, he forged sources. Yet he was not a mere forger: only the works attributed to Thomas Rowley and his set are called forgeries. Chatterton's other pieces in his two-volume Works are literature, as opposed to literary forgeries (in a sense, they are aberrant works in the canon of a forger). This essay will focus on Rowley: is it enough to say that Thomas Chatterton forged the works attributed to Thomas Rowley?

The definition of forgery begs a thousand questions: questions of intention and reception, counterfeit and plagiarism, imitation and pastiche, mimesis and representation. In a word, it always refers to a set of conditions outside the text. It is criminal evidence of authorial intention, or (in the case of the death of the forger) it is an enigma ravelled about the discourses of scholarly opinion. The word anticipates both the problem to be solved, and the solution. But Chatterton, I will argue, produced forgeries-within-forgeries which magnify the clumsiness of attempts to explain away his work, and which radically challenged notions of history and writing in the eighteenth century.

In Chatterton's work, meaning is always escaping into the remnants of things, language bristles like a hedgehog rolled up beneath spikes, or blurs into the scorch marks of decaying manuscripts. The reader is left to puzzle over quills or cinders. Indeed in ‘Clifton’ (unforged), Chatterton suggests that history may appear to evade its own process by side-stepping into language and then shrouding itself in mildew upon the worm-eaten page.

Yet the page itself is rotting away, enacting the very process of time:

O'er the historick page my fancy runs,
Of Britain's fortunes, of her valiant sons,
You castle, erst of Saxon standards proud,
Its neighbouring meadows dy'd with Danish bloody …
But for its ancient use no more employ'd,
Its walls all moulder'd and its gates destroy'd;
In Hist'ry's roll it still a shade retains,
Tho' of the fortress scarce a stone remains.(2)

Thus in the shade of ‘Hist'ry's roll’, we see only the sign of writing having passed, not the language itself. In fact, meaning decays as inevitably as the fragile medium of the medieval manuscript. This essay will argue that the manuscript defied eighteenth-century literary antiquarianism. It was in opposition to the print ideology of scholarship, and so was judged to be fundamentally inauthentic. But the manuscript (especially in the Rowley corpus) inevitably remained a vehicle, a mode of transference, or a metaphor, for history—a version of history that would embarrass literary antiquarianism. The argument draws on my own earlier work, and has been indirectly inspired by a minor constellation of theoretical essays.³

On 8 February 1777, Thomas Tyrwhitt published the first volume of Rowley poetry: Poems, supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century. The collection contained a selection of ancient poems and dramatic verse, mainly by one Thomas Rowley. These literary remains had been discovered in St Mary Redcliffe Church in Bristol in the late 1760s by a teenager called Thomas Chatterton, a Colston charity boy and an attorney's clerk. Chatterton's father had begun rifling through the old chests in the muniment room in the 1750s, and his posthumous son followed him in these wormy habits. Chatterton, a voracious reader and a prolific writer, claimed in about 1768 to have discovered the works of Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century priest, in an old chest in the muniment room over the north porch of the church. The Rowley corpus was enormous, including poems, prose, drawings, and maps, and appeared to be a major literary find. Chatterton had produced more and more examples while living and working in Bristol before moving to London a few months before his death in 1770, either adolescent suicide or dreadful accident. He was only seventeen. Soon after, these ‘Rowley Poems’ found themselves at the centre of an argument concerning their authenticity, first in Bristol and Bath, then in London. With the 1777 edition, these sparks of doubt were blown into an inferno of controversy which raged for the next two or three decades. It was eventually concluded that the works were all forged by the boy. History was written rather than rewritten.

The proofs were (and in a sense still are) conclusive, and so the story of Chatterton is already anticipated in its telling—anticipated as a story explaining and explaining away the phenomenon of ‘literary forgery’. But a doubt remains in the plausible accounts of the eighteenth-century literati, not in the Romantic mythography of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats, nor in the postmodern intertextuality of Peter Ackroyd. A single page from the 1777 edition of the Rowley Poems presents a riddle. The title-page of Tyrwhitt's Rowley Poems highlighted the manuscript status of Rowley: ‘THE GREATEST PART NOW FIRST PUBLISHED FROM THE MOST AUTHENTIC COPIES, WITH AN ENGRAVED SPECIMEN OF ONE OF THE MSS.’⁴ This engraving, ‘The Accounte of W. Canynges Feast’, was a startling image, displaying extravagantly archaic calligraphy, exotic Gothic lettering, and featuring illustrations of two heraldic shields. The visual impact of the document was further enhanced by its position in the volume: facing the printed transcript of ‘The Accounte of W. Canynges Feast’, which looked desolate in comparison. … The relationship between the typographic text and the unique engraving of a Rowley manuscript is both fascinating and bewildering.

Despite the sparse image of print compared with the magnificence of the parchments, the form of Rowley on the printed page was still grotesquely strange: Chatterton forged a pseudo-medieval language. He scavenged archaic words from the glossaries of Chaucer and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and had a Shakespearean talent for comparable neologism and coinage. And he garbed this odd pastiche in an idiosyncratic, supposedly archaic orthography. Chatterton invented a poetic Rowleyan language by doubling consonants, substitutions (‘y’ for ‘i’ and ‘c’ for ‘k’), and (indeed like Percy in his Reliques) adding redundant e's to most words.⁵ Antiquity was guaranteed by redundancy and copiousness, like Gothic architecture (indeed, very like the Gothic of St Mary Redcliffe). All these orthographic oddities were faithfully reproduced in the Rowley Poems and Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (a follow-up volume printed in 1778), and the very lines drew attention to their rough physicality:

Geofroie makes vearse, as handycraftes theyr ware;
Wordes wythoute sense fulle groffyngelye* he twynes,
Cotteynge hys storie off as wythe a sheere;
*foolishly. [Chatterton's note.](6)

For the majority of readers, readers of the posthumous, printed editions, this bizarre language was the most immediately compelling aspect of Rowley. It barked and rasped with a guttural new poetic voice, echoing from the iron depths of fantastic medieval armour, even if it was easily strangled by deft wit.⁷

In his History of English Poetry in 1781, the pioneering literary historian and poet, Thomas Warton, modernized the ‘Notbrowne Mayde’ to challenge Edward Capell's dating of the poem.⁸ This technique of textual analysis was based on the assumption that history was integral rather than superficial to a poem, but was ultimately simply a force acting on language, a factor of linguistic change, a structuring principle: that language is writ on the roll of history and offered the sign of times passed.

The technique was full of all the confidence of burgeoning literary history: indeed it could be seen as its whole rationale, the demonstration of historical change and literary improvement. There was none of the abysmal semantic melancholy that Chatterton suggests in ‘Clifton’ and elsewhere. In consequence, translation and pastiche were enthusiastically propounded by ‘anti-Rowleyans’ as demystifiers in the debates about the poems. William Mason deployed the device most tellingly in An Archeological Epistle to the Reverend and Worshipful Jeremiah Milles (1782): the ‘Epistlle to Doctoure Mylles’ was a piece of verse describing the controversy and its participants in Rowleyan language, and the effect was both absurd and hallucinatory. George Hardinge added a little Rowley pastiche, ‘To the Dygne Reader’ to his play Rowley and Chatterton in the Shades: or, Nugae Antiquitae et Novae (1782). The Shakespearean editor Edmond Malone, too, in his pamphlet Cursory Observations on the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782), took delight in rewriting Chatterton's poems: ‘Chatterton in Masquerade’ was a translation of ‘Narva and Mored’ into Rowleyan, while ‘Chatterton Unmasked’ modernized the Rowleyan ‘First Eclogue’.

Of most interest is an unsigned letter to the Public Advertiser, dated 19 March 1782, in homage to Mason's ‘Epistlle to Doctoure Mylles’ (the pastiche of a forgery). The correspondent suggests that other authors be garbed in ‘Archaeological Language’ to affect a sort of textual alchemy: ‘This, however, I would not call Translation, but Transmutation, for a very obvious Reason.’ The opening of Paradise Lost and the famous soliloquy from Hamlet are offered as tongue-in-cheek examples:

Offe mannes fyrste bykrous volunde wolle I singe,
And offe the fruicte offe yatte caltyfnyd tre
Whose lethall taste ynto thys Worlde dydde brynge
Both mothe and tene to all posteritie.
To blynne or not to blynne the denwere is;
Gif ytte bee bette wythinne the spryte to beare
The bawsyn floes and tackels of dystresse,
Or by forloynyng amenuse them clere.

Ironically, this transmutation does dazzle us like newly-minted gold as we recognize the familiar in a new radiance. It is reminiscent of R. L. C. Lorimer's recent Scottish Macbeth

Whuff, cannle-dwop!
Life's nocht but a scug gangin, a bauch actor
as strunts an fykes his ae hour on the stage.(9)

The perspective of the text is strictly from the present looking to the past (sidelong, in the case of Lorimer); history is focused like a spectacle before the gaze of the present. There could be no more powerful demonstration that eighteenth-century literary antiquarianism heralded the genealogy of the perfection of the art of writing.¹⁰ History came of age in the genius of the present.

Having proved to their satisfaction that Chatterton's Rowley language actually supported their theories of linguistic integrity, the antiquarians pursued this theme by considering each word as an object, with its own linear history. Reviewing the Rowley Poems in 1777, Ralph Griffiths called them ‘Mock Ruins’, (although the volume contained no fragments), and in 1782, Warton observed, ‘A builder of ruins is seldom exact throughout in his imitation of the old-fashioned architecture.’¹¹ He presented Chatterton's work as a visual pastiche: ‘In dictionaries of old English, he saw words detached and separated from their context: these he seized and combined with others, without considering their relative or other accidental signification.’¹² Malone too described the poems in architectural terms: ‘Many of the stones which this ingenious boy employed in his building … are as old as those at Stone-henge; but the beautiful fabrick that he has raised is tied together by modern cement, and is covered by a stucco of no older date than that of Wyat and Adams.’¹³ He gave several examples of Chatterton's plagiarisms from the cultural monument of the canon. Indeed, spotting Rowley's sources was a game started in the St. James's Chronicle in 1778 and enthusiastically prosecuted by another Shakespearean, George Steevens. This device effectively foiled a discussion of the poetical merits of Rowley by implying that any verse could be composed in this allusive way, that it was entirely dependent on earlier writers, that it was parasitic and derivative and plagiarized.

Jacob Bryant, a fearsomely and erratically learned defender of Rowley, was scornful of Chatterton's supposed use of dictionaries and glossaries: ‘We may as well suppose, that a pedlar built York cathedral by stealing a tile, or a stone, in every parish he passed through.’¹⁴ But Vicesimus Knox was nonplussed:

Thyself thou has emblazoned; thine own monument thou hast erected. … Thou hast built an artificial ruin. The stones are mossy and old, the whole fabric appears really antique to the distant and the careless spectator; even the connoisseur, who pores with spectacles on the single stones, and inspects the mossy concretions with an antiquarian eye, boldly authenticates its antiquity; but they who examine without prejudice, and by the criterion of common sense, clearly discover the cement and the workmanship of a modern mason.¹⁵

Why the architectural imagery? Horace Walpole, in his Anecdotes of Painting in England, had famously made antiquarianism visionary, a way of feeling the ‘magic hardiness’ of the Gothic: ‘One must have taste to be sensible of the beauties of Grecian architecture; one only wants passions to feel Gothic.’¹⁶ He described the English Gothic past as an enormous painting or piece of architecture, both visual and tactile—‘vaults, tombs, painted windows, gloom, and perspectives’—analogous to his own medieval simulation, Strawberry Hill. Walpole's Gothic metonyms derived from the persistent use in earlier works of architectural images to describe old language. For example, Elizabeth Cooper's The Muses Library compared the ‘Gothique Rudeness’ of Chaucer and Spencer [sic] to the ‘Monumental Statues of the Dead’, and John Weever's Ancient Funeral Monuments (quoted by Chatterton) had an ecclesiastical Gothic atmosphere of black-letter inscriptions and crypts which is redolent of Walpole, and Rowley too.¹⁷ Gothic was a sentimental reading of the past in which archaic language was objectified and fetishized. Moreover, as with architectural uses of porticoes or arched windows, each medieval word, even each unexpected use of a ‘k’ or doubled consonant or redundant ‘e’, was a gesture that alluded to the whole culture and recalled history. They functioned as relics, or rather meaning was securely encased in these encrusted reliquaries. Like bits and pieces of saints (or in antiquarian cabinets of curiosities, like the remains of secular heroes and heroines) the presentation of words in this ritual way seemed to suggest that they shared in the physical reality of some event—history—but also transcended it. They were fragments of true meaning, with the authority of their own existence.

Why was this metaphor so insistent? It is not enough to state that Chatterton's art rose with the archive, was an odd contortion of a print culture which favoured ready retrieval devices such as glossaries and dictionaries. Rowley's works were discovered in a church muniment room, and Rowley was in one sense a sepulchre. But the sepulchre was empty, there was no poetry among the vellum scraps Chatterton and his father collected. Chatterton is suggesting that meaning has an origin outside of history.

This is apparent in his weaving of text and commentary: the double narratives of medieval poetry and editorial annotations. Chatterton's editorial persona provided a constant commentary and at times drowned out the poetry. Sometimes nearly every word in a line would be footnoted. The reader was prevented from reading the pieces: the poetry represented its own disappearance under the tide of the present. When the pieces were published, the reader was bullied into seeing in them merely the sign of ancient poetry: the polyvalency of archaisms and footnotes. Annotation was ostentatious: to conspicuously display erudition served to authenticate the poems within the discourses of scholarship.

Rowley was split into many voices. For the antiquarians, the question was to discover where these voices began, either in the 1760s or the 1460s, but the question of origins also carried the big cultural question, where did our history, our national past, begin? Rowley does not offer the convenient linearity of Warton's scheme, precisely because he is not part of the great tradition: he is an outsider, whether real (interred in the muniment room) or not. Rowley's history is fragmentary, a decaying palimpsest too fragile to scrape clean. In the shady muniment room, where the vellum scraps were gathered like so many sibylline leaves, the broken texts could only be a metaphor for the past. There was nothing really there.

So English literary history was no longer confined to the past in the 1760s when Rowley was emerging. The works appeared in a highly charged literary context, at the moment of the construction of the canon of English poetry in Percy's Reliques, and were published at the moment of literary history's being written in Warton's History of English Poetry (1774-81). In fact, Rowley actually featured in the second volume of Warton's History (1778) in a twenty-five page section, which was in press some time before Tyrwhitt's edition.

Warton had published the first volume of his authoritative History in 1774, in which a preliminary dissertation had stressed the importance of literacy: indeed, the essay ‘On the Introduction of Learning into England’ reads like a bibliolator's Grand Tour. Literacy flourished all over Gothic Europe. King Alfred promoted no illiterate priests and translated Latin authors into his native Saxon, while ‘the conqueror himself patronised and loved letters’ and demonstrated his power and control over his new land by outlawing the Saxon tongue.¹⁸ In this case, literate language had created problems for the native Saxons: the Normans would not accept Saxon documents of property rights because they implied a rejection of the new ruler, and this necessitated the ‘pious fraud’ of forging monastic charters (reminiscent of the Donation of Constantine) (I, 3 n.). Moreover, forgery was an inevitable part of medieval manuscript culture: copying and plagiarizing from manuscripts were the only way of disseminating and circulating texts. But precisely because of this, it became a characteristic against which eighteenth-century print culture and scholarship defined itself.

Warton's History did raise concern about the status of sources. Although his first volume was derived from manuscripts, Warton made no mention of the uniqueness of his texts, nor the nature of chirographic culture: he was wary of mentioning the word ‘manuscript’ at all. One of the aims of the History seems to have been to create an anthology or ‘general repository of our antient poetry’, although Warton explicitly denied this (I, 208). Because so much of Warton's material had not previously been published he quoted his illustrations at length, reprinting the earliest extant manuscript of a poem under the assumption that it provided the most reliable text (I, 101).

In the second volume of his History of English Poetry, Warton encountered Caxton, and very briefly described the impact of moveable type: it played a vital part in disseminating literature, ‘contributed to sow the seeds of a national erudition, and to form a popular taste’; and ‘multiplied English readers, and these again produced new vernacular writers’ (II, 122, 124 n.). But because Warton had treated the chirographic texts of pre-Caxton verse as if they had the authority of typographic texts, he did not suggest that Caxton's innovation in any way revolutionized the word on the page. The transition between manuscript and print culture was elided. Eighteenth-century scholarship was grounded in print and printed books, which itself implied a linear history. Literature, the object of antiquarian study, necessarily predated it, but scholarship had the capaciousness enabled by print to comprehend it. English verse did not arrive with Caxton's press; its origins had to be presented as lost in the mists and myths of time (and as competitors with the Celts and other northern pretenders), but also recoverable through historical theory and research. Warton was writing a teleological history of English poetry; he only stressed that print provided the instruments of modern scholarship.

Warton devoted a whole section of his second volume to Rowley. For this chapter, he quoted long passages of Rowley as part of his larger argument of literary progress. The technique enabled him to juxtapose Rowley with the fifteenth-century verse that supported his argument, and so to deny the incongruous Rowley a place in the system he was perfecting. Although the Rowley remains were constantly invoked and scrutinized by Warton, no referent such as ‘The Accounte of W. Canynges Feast’ was provided. And although Warton described his analyses of calligraphy, ink, and parchment, this forensic account had to be taken on trust because these very features were not reproducible in a printed book.

Rowley appeared then at the moment the canon became an issue: who was to be included or excluded from Warton's epoch-making work? The work of Percy and Warton, not to mention Samuel Johnson in the Dictionary and the Lives, was about uncovering the printable manuscript: recognizing the manuscripts in which inherent typography was most lucidly articulated. Print was the yardstick of antiquarian evidence. The cause and consequence of the canon, formulated in the eighteenth century, was that typographic structures were perceived to be inherent in manuscripts. And it was this print-determined selectivity that literary forgery exposed.

Rowley attempted to find or construct a place outside the all-pervasive culture of typography, and therefore insisted on all the untypographic elements of the medium: calligraphy, ink, paper or parchment, as well as provenance, damage, and supplementarity. They forced print to insist and re-insist upon its totalitarianism, because these untranslatable aspects of the manuscript exposed the absolutist assumptions of typography. To establish that Rowley was spurious, Warton did not in fact visit Bristol, or even handle a Rowleian manuscript: they were described to him in correspondence which, being ideally suited to printing, he of course published. The manuscript was treated as an entirely inauthentic document, because it was unsuited to being printed—though it was never declared to be inauthentic, except in cases such as the Rowley controversy.

So the actual conceptual problem that Rowley's manuscript posed the eighteenth-century literary antiquarians—is there anything more to letters than typography?—was never actually answered. The works of Chatterton were declared ‘forgeries’ by Warton, and others, and dismissed to an incoherent twilight, because if this work, called forgery, did find a place outside typography, it could, like Archimedes and his place to stand on, move the world. All literature might be forged.

This is the challenge posed by the manuscript, the crux of Chatterton-Rowley so dramatically played out in the two (printed) pages of ‘The Accounte of W. Canynges Feast’. The whole dreadful significance of the Rowley hoard lay in Chatterton's use of the found manuscript. Manuscripts subverted print: the manuscrit trouvé, complete with lacunae and illegible letters, could not be adequately reproduced on the printed page of eighteenth-century literary histories. While exposing the profound limitations of print, the page exercised an extraordinary fascination upon contemporaries. It was reproduced in all the editions of Rowley and in commentaries as late as 1809, and was discussed, almost without exception, in Rowley Controversy books, pamphlets, and magazine articles.¹⁹ This was a tantalizing glimpse of the real thing, the supposed manuscript, although it was, of course, just a particularly well-disguised printed page.

The page collapses definitions of forgery and originality. This manuscript is supposedly original (and yet in an important sense it is still a copy). It is a forgery of a work which is original, yet which (it is claimed by detractors) has no original. It exposes a contradiction, or paradox, in the very definition of forgery: while an economic forger, a counterfeiter, is able to forge a bank note (that is, make an exact copy of something which already exists), such as a £5 note, the same forger is not able to pass off an original forgery, such as a £3 note. But art and literary forgers do forge works that might never have previously existed. So, strangely, the text is sign and proof of both authenticity and fraudulence. It is both true and untrue (and was employed as evidence on both sides of the authenticity debate). So it seems that the whole idea of forgery becomes impossibly refracted. The word loses its authority to present and solve a problem, because Chatterton has produced, (posthumously) on this page, and more radically in his vellum Rowley manuscripts, forgeries-within-forgeries. They secrete the odour of an intricate textual problem, but the secret they reveal is that there is no secret, and no basis for literary antiquarian criticism. We see a printed skeleton, clothed (on the right) with the flesh of chirography. But it is, at its core, for Tyrwhitt and Warton and Walpole, a printed artefact. The manuscript, within the metaphysics of typography, is simply a corruption of print, a deviation from it. All manuscripts are already typographic on these terms, but still the manuscript is more: it has an excess, a capacity uncontained by the typeface and engraving.

For this reason, the manuscript per se was not part of published literary antiquarianism: it was an image rather than an object, a shadow cast upon the screen of print. Of course Percy, Warton, Capell, and Walpole all used manuscripts, but they did not publish engravings of manuscripts as textual artefacts, nor did they clearly acknowledge their indebtedness to manuscript sources. The jockeying for ancient sources between Percy and James Macpherson in Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763) and the Reliques, and the collected Ossian (1765) respectively, demonstrated that not just the emergent canon but cultural identity was at stake. But evidently there was a great deal of confusion about the status afforded to literary-antiquarian evidence. The over-scrupulous editing of Edward Capell and ‘Don’ Bowle was contrasted with the sentimental panache of Richard Hurd and Walpole; and both Macpherson and Percy ran into difficulties when they tried to present manuscripts.

Because Chatterton produced manuscripts that could be circulated, rather than transcriptions or proofsheets, there are enormous differences between his work and that of Macpherson and Percy and other antiquarians. Editors with ambitions to publish experienced great difficulties expressing themselves on the printed page, but Chatterton side-stepped these problems by concentrating on the manuscripts, leaving others to plan the publication.²⁰ Although Chatterton verified his source as Macpherson and Percy had verified theirs, by local testimonial, internal proofs, and supporting argument, he alone introduced forensic evidence. It was the latter that precipitated the Rowley controversy: the existence of palpable objects was missing from Ossian and Reliques. No matter how hard the antiquarians tried in claiming that old Gothic words had the ‘magic hardiness’ of old Gothic buildings, it was clear that they did not have the ephemeral precision of a manuscript. Chatterton slotted Rowley between Macpherson's late recognition of the necessity of manuscripts and Percy's mirage of the source (his jealously guarded folio manuscript). Critics and scholars alike were able to exercise their wit and erudition on their impression of one of these actual documents. Indeed, because only two Rowley pieces were published in Chatterton's lifetime (the ‘Bridge Narrative’ in Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 1 October 1768, and ‘Elinoure and Juga’ in the Town and Country Magazine, May 1769), we are left with a body of material which created a controversy motivated in part by the problems in printing it.

Chatterton cheerfully embraced the protean nature of manuscript culture. A lengthy closing footnote to the ‘Bristowe Tragedy’ stressed the importance of this context. After verifying the beheading of Bawdin with reference to the historian John Stow, Chatterton wrote asking for more evidence:

But a more Authentick Evidence of this Fact I met with in an old Parchment Roll, in which among other Curiosities preserv'd in the Cabinet of Mr Canynge, is mentioned ….

I shall conclude this with remarking, that if Gentlemen of Fortune wou'd take the trouble of looking over the Manuscripts in their Possession, which are only valued for their Antiquity, it might possibly throw Light upon many obscure Passages in and help to establish a more Concise History of our Native Country, than even Cambden's Britania.

(Works, 1, 20 n.)

Chatterton's reinvention of manuscript sources received its fullest exposition in ‘A Brief Account of William Cannings from the Life of Thomas Rowlie Preeste’. This short prose piece explained how Canynge ordered Rowley to ‘goe to all the Abbies and Pryoryes, and gather together auncient drawynges, if of any Account; at any Price’ (1, 51). The Wapolean Canynge was interested in old English painters, but the Chattertonian Rowley was more concerned with manuscripts, and discovered a Saxon parchment at the ‘Minster of oure Ladie and Saincte Godwyne’, which he bought and set ‘diligentlie to translate and worde it in Englishe Metre’ (1, 52, 54). A year later he had the ‘Battle of Hastynges’. Over eight hundred years, the poem had been transmitted from Turgotus to Rowley to Chatterton. The nature of the source affected the poem and its presentation, and the uniqueness of the source was stressed because it determined the text. In this case, Chatterton complained in his editorial introduction that the poem was incomplete:

AN Ancient poem called the Battle of Hastynges written by Turgot a Saxon Monk in the Tenth Century and translated by Thomas Ronlie [sic: a deliberate error by Chatterton's editorial persona] the remayning Part of this Poem I have not been happy enough to meet with—

(1, 26-27)

which was hardly surprising after eight centuries. But the transmission of the poem did more than reinscribe, did more than record the impact of history upon the text. The silence of the absent part is not Chatterton's suppressed rejoicing at having found an excuse not to finish the piece, but the resounding silence of history. Language has passed without a trace, only the rump of the poem remains.

The manuscript as a metaphor for history, a vehicle for the liquidation of language, was reflected in Rowley's other activities. Canynge employed Rowley to compile lists of inscriptions, recording relics of antique text on a parchment which Chatterton reduced to a hopeless fragment itself (1, 117-18, facing p. 116). Fragmentation verified the manuscript source in the act of destroying it, and the inevitable attempts of readers to fill in the gaps with conjectural emendations was cruelly satirized by Chatterton. In the effervescent prose skit ‘Memoirs of a Sad Dog’, he had Baron Otranto misread a broken and eroded gravestone, ‘James Hicks lieth here, with Hester his wife’, as ‘Hic jacet corpus Kenelmae Sancto Legero. Requiescat’ (1, 659). The fragmentary stone was a memorial to lost languages rather than a testament to antiquarian genius.

The shift of focus, from writing to history, from print to manuscript, from language to silence, that Rowley precipitated created a contagious game of Chinese whispers, or rather, a wild paper chase. If ancient manuscripts spoke most eloquently of their silence and meaninglessness, modern manuscripts (in the guise of transcripts) larded this profound silence with the clamour of voices, all saying the same thing but every one speaking in a different tongue. Tyrwhitt had provided the Rowley Poems with an ‘Introductory Account of the Several Pieces contained in this Volume’, which detailed provenance, textual variants, historical background, references, and sources (pp. xv-xxv). George Catcott and William Barrett, original Bristol supporters of Rowley, had gradually disseminated transcripts to trusted allies, who in turn had copied the texts to enlist supporters, and so on. This had been going on for seven years, so the Rowley texts existed in countless variants. They had spawned a subculture of migratory and self-duplicating manuscripts that further upset the authority of print and actually mirrored the clamorous manuscript culture of Rowley. If a manuscript copy of a genuine ancient manuscript could be made by Chatterton or Catcott, a facsimile (or counterfeit) manuscript copy could also be made: a forgery of a forgery. This copy would not necessarily invalidate the original document, but as the ‘original forgery’ needed not exist anyway, it made the concept of the original superfluous. Transcripts were marauders: wonderfully ambiguous signs which harried the unanimous uniformity of print with ever-mutating texts, so they too became engaged in another ceaseless Chattertonian attack upon the assumption that typography was the fundamental medium of literature and the empirical unit of literary history.

This sort of argument was elaborated by pro-Rowleians such as Henry Dampier, who responded to Warton with Remarks upon the Eighth Section of the Second Volume of Mr. Warton's History of English Poetry.²¹ Dampier answered some of Warton's points—the staining of the paper, the colour of ink—while at the same time denying that the extant manuscripts represented any definite grounds for refutation anyway: ‘The proofs that even this manuscript is a forgery, are by no means incontestable; nor if they were, would it follow the course, that all or any of the other manuscripts must necessarily be so too’ (p. 30). If the parchments were fakes, it meant that they could be Chatterton's counterfeits of genuine documents, and another link in the chain of transmission from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. (Dampier also criticized Warton's instinctive citation of Percy's glossary to the Reliques as a Rowley source. It simply showed the literati closing ranks.)

Rayner Hickford argued with most awareness on the issue of sources, in Observations on the Poems attributed to Rowley. Hickford was not afraid to argue that sources, and therefore meaning, were endlessly deferred: for example, he brilliantly demonstrated that the provenance of ‘Verses to Johne Ladgate, with Johne Ladgate's Answer’ was a maze of chirographic transmission.²² Hickford also pointed out that Rowley himself was not unlike certain eighteenth-century editors, and was prepared to rewrite ancient history, to ‘clean it from it's rust’ (p. 13).

But the most obsessive defence came from the grinding pen of Jacob Bryant. Bryant's doorstop of a book, Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley (1781), was an unstable juggernaut pulled along by sheer erudition. Writing as if through gritted teeth, he insisted that the lexical peculiarities of Rowley were caused by the influence of oral dialects on chirographic culture:

Before the art of printing became of general use, it is scarcely possible to conceive, but that people must have written in dialects: for they had no standard, by which they could be regulated; and if there had existed any thing of this nature in any particular place, it could not have been universally kept up, for want of that intercourse and correspondence, which are so essential to its influence and authority.

(p. 8)

Bryant's whole method was based on what he perceived to be the shortcomings of scribal culture, and it was the scholar's unflinching duty to scrape away these transcriptural mistakes. Bryant attempted to reconstitute the archetypal manuscripts from which Chatterton had worked. His scholarship was visionary: an absolute recovery and reconstitution of what was incoherently expressed:

Whether the Mss. was at all impaired, and the words in some degree effaced: or whether it were owing to his ignorance, and carelessness, I know not: but thus much is certain, that the terms are sadly transposed, and changed, to the ruin of the context.

(p. 95)

Bryant brought his etymological researches to Rowley: as John Cleland had suggested a few years earlier (1768), ‘The antientest way of spelling a word is ever the best guide to the decomposition of it’.²³ No letter or word was secure from interrogation and revision, no phrase or meaning was contained, but seeped hermetic inference, enabling Bryant to rewrite Rowley. He queried whether it was possible for the Bristol youth to be familiar with as much arcane lore as he was himself:

There are many dark hints and intimations, with which he [Chatterton] was totally unacquainted. From these secret allusions I have been induced to think, that some of these poems were not even of the age of Rowley, but far antecedent: being composed by some person, or persons, who were not far removed from the times and events, which they celebrate [e.g. ‘Hastings’].

(p. 206)

Bryant therefore interpreted literature as a semiotic medium: cultural significance was only conducted to those familiar with a structure underlying everyday language. In this way Bryant extended his notion of language to the whole system of signs—Chatterton's biography, manuscript provenance, etymology, aesthetics, intertextuality—which constituted the reception of Rowley. The distinction between text and context was entirely dissolved. Ultimately, texts for Bryant were only part of a large cultural code; they did not constitute it: in fact they constituted a celebration of his own abstruse learning.

Bryant's work reads like a crusade down the road of history, a road littered with manuscripts, with ashes, indeed with cinders. Derrida has proposed the metaphor of the cinder to describe the trace, and we may perceive in the manuscript, read ‘In Hist'ry's roll’ (itself subject to reduction by tearing, mildew, and cinders), what is left after language has been exhausted.²⁴ Crumbling manuscripts are both fragile and tenacious, they are on the border between things and words, and they may carry us down the path that leads to origins. But they testify to the passing of language, not to language itself; the manuscript is always already too late, it is record of something done and gone. Chatterton aged a manuscript by holding it over a flame and thereby fading the words to leave ‘the mellow vestiges of evanscent ink’.²⁵ If the manuscript carries us down the path that leads to origins, there are only cinders there.

‘The Accounte of W. Canynges Feast’ is now in the British Library.²⁶ It is a tiny document (the 1777 facsimile is full size). The text runs to all edges of the parchment; there is a complete absence of margins, whitespace, titles, and in these versions, notes. And it is black as soot.

On 9 March 1784, William Jessop wrote to Thomas Percy on the subject of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:

Oh for a ray of Chatterton's genius. Had I this, I should soon send you a roll ten yards long of worm-eaten vellum, which should, here and there, amidst undecypherable hieroglyphics, exhibit to you a legible distambour upon the miserable substratum with silk and gold of your own property.²⁷

The manuscript source was acknowledged ‘undecypherable’; it stretched like a canvas for the editor to embroider. Antiquarian literary history spun its loquacious myths out of the indecipherable, incomprehensible silence of history. The most poignant Rowley manuscripts that remain are those that Taylor lists as ‘illegible antiqued parchments’: unreadable manuscripts that gave up their secrets when no one was reading. Writing has passed ‘O'er the historick page’, and passed away.

Notes

1. The Council of Egypt (1963), trans. by Adrienne Foulkes (London: Harvill, 1993), pp. 63-64.

2. The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. by Donald S. Taylor, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 1, 343.

3. See Narratives of Forgery, ed. by Nick Groom, Angelaki, 1.2 (1993); Nick Groom, ‘Celts, Goths, and the Nature of the Literary Source’, in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, ed, by Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ, and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 275-96; Jean Baudrillard, ‘Gesture and Signature: Semiurgy in Contemporary Art’, in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. by Charles Levin (n.p.: Telos Press, 1981), pp. 102-11; Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 307-30; Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche Genealogy History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).

4. Poems, supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth century, ed. by Thomas Tyrwhitt (London, 1777), sig. al^r.

5. The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. by Walter W. Skeat, 2 vols (London: Bell & Daldy, 1872), 11, xxxv-xl, 1176-80.

6. Rowley Poems, p. 69: Works, I, 176.

7. See Richard Holmes, ‘Thomas Chatterton: The Case Re-Opened’, Cornhill Magazine, 178 (1970), 230.

8. The History of English Poetry, 3 vols (London, 1774-81), III, 136.

9. Times Literary Supplement, 18 September 1992. p. 14.

10. See David Fairer, ‘Organizing Verse: Burke's Reflections and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry’ (forthcoming, Romanticism).

11. Monthly Review, 28 (1777), 256. After printing the ‘Testimony of George Catcott’ in the May issue (originally his ‘Introduction’ and ‘Remarks’), the June Review concluded ‘We do not hesitate to pronounce that these Poems are the original production of Rowley, with many alterations and interpolation by Chatterton’ (pp. 312, 449). The sceptical Gentleman's Magazine printed the song of Robin and Alice from ‘Aella’, ‘With some trivial Alterations’: it was completely modernized (Gentleman's Magazine, 47 (1777), 275).

12. Thomas Warton, An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems attributed to Rowley (London, 1782), p. 43.

13. Edmond Malone, Cursory Observations on the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley, A Priest of the Fifteenth Century (London, 1782), pp. 11-12.

14. Jacob Bryant, Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley: in which the Authenticity of those Poems is Ascertained (London, 1781), p. 423.

15. ‘On the Poems attributed to Rowley’, in Essays Moral and Literary, 2 vols (London, 1782), II, 251.

16. Anecdotes of Painting in England, 3 vols (Twickenham, 1762), II, 107-08.

17. Elizabeth Cooper [and William Oldys], The Muses Library; or, A Series of English Poetry, from the Saxons to the Reign of King Charles II, 2 vols (London, 1737), I, xii[i]; John Weever, Antient Funeral Monuments, of Great-Britain, Ireland, and the Islands Adjacent (1631), 2nd edn (London, 1767), ‘A Discourse on Funeral Monuments, &c.’, p. vi. This prefatory Discourse defined monument not simply as physical testaments to human lives or achievements, but ‘to speak properly of a monument … it is a receptacle or sepulchre, purposely made, erected, or built, to receive a dead corps, and to preserve the same from violation’. Chatterton claimed to have discovered the Rowley works in William Canynge's chest in the muniment room over the north porch of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. Chatterton referred to Weever in ‘Antiquity of Christmas Games’ (Works, I, 411) and ‘Memoirs of a Sad Dog’ (Works, I, 659).

18. Warton, I, sig, f. I^v.

19. In 1809 John Sherwen tried to resume the defence of Rowley, but despite the passage of a quarter of a century, could offer no new angle on the question. He resorted to ‘The Accounte of W. Canynges Feast’ in order to solve two textual cruces and thereby authenticate the poems. He suggested ‘hath’ for ‘han’ and ‘Yche corse’ for ‘Syke keene’ (Introduction to an Examination of Some Part of the Internal Evidence, respecting the Antiquity and Authenticity of Certain Publications, said to have been found in Manuscripts at Bristol, Written by a Learned Priest and Others, in the Fifteenth Century; but generally considered as the Suppositious Productions of an Ingenious Youth of the Present Age (Bath, 1809), p. 130).

20. Ian Haywood, ‘Chatterton's Plans for the Publication of the Forgery’, RES, 36 (1985), 58-68 (reprinted in The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction (London: Associated University Press, 1986), pp. 175-84). See also Michael F. Suarez, ‘What Thomas Knew: Chatterton and the Business of getting into Print’, in Angelaki, 1.2 (1993), 83-94; Jonathan Barry, ‘The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol: Chatterton in Bristol’, in Angelaki, 1.2 (1993), 55-58; Jonathan Barry, ‘Provincial Town Culture, 1640-1789: Urbane or Civic?’, in Interpretation and Cultural History, ed. by Joan H. Pittock and Andrew Wear (London: Macmillan, 1991), 198-223, p. 219); Jonathan Barry, ‘Representations of the Past in Bristol: 1625-1789’ (unpublished typescript, pp. 26-27). I am grateful to Dr Barry for making this research available to me.

21. (London, [1780(?)]). This has also been attributed to Francis Woodward. See E. H. W. Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton (London: Ingpen & Grant, 1930), p. 470 n.

22. Observations on the Poems attributed to Rowley (London, 1782), pp. 11-12.

23. John Cleland, The Way to Things by Words, and to Words by Things, being a Sketch of an Attempt at the Retrieval of the Antient Celtic, or, Primitive Language of Europe (London, 1768), p. 83.

24. Jaques Derrida, Cinders, trans. by Ned Lukacher (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

25. Warton, An Enquiry, p. 3.

26. London, British Library, Add. MS 5766A, fol. 6.

27. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Percy b. 1, fol. 3^r.